The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. Due to the now ubiquitous nature of electronic communication devices, people of all ages and education levels are utilizing electronic devices to communicate with other individuals or contacts, receive services and/or share information, media and other content. One area in which there is a demand to increase ease of convenience to users relates to the handling of incoming calls and communication messages that are received from one or more communication devices via one or more communication methods. The communication methods may enable a user of a communication device to communicate by telephone, email, instant messaging (IM), text messaging (also called short messaging service or SMS), multimedia messaging service (MMS), or any combination thereof.
In this regard, a user of a communication device may call or send a message to a user of another communication device such as for example a mobile terminal via any of the above-mentioned communication methods. Typically, the communication device recognizes if the received call or message is sent from a caller/sender that is identified in its contact list (e.g., phonebook) and in this regard a caller/sender's name is typically shown on a display of the communication device. However, in some instances, the communication device receiving (e.g., also referred to herein as recipient device) the call or message may not have the contact information associated with the caller/sender of the message saved in its contact list. As such, the contact information (e.g., a contact name) associated with the caller/sender may be unknown to the recipient device and the user of the recipient device may not know the originator of the call or the sender of the message.
Typically, when a call or message is received from an unknown sender, a communication device such as a mobile terminal saves the phone number, email address or username associated with the call or message and a date that the call or message was received. These calls or messages may be saved by the mobile terminal in a registry such as a call registry (which may include recent calls such as last dialed, received and missed calls), a message registry or the like. However, if the mobile terminal is reset, (e.g., removal of a battery from the mobile terminal) the data in the registry is typically removed from the mobile terminal.
At present, it is sometimes difficult for a user of a mobile terminal to recognize if calls or messages continue to be received from the same unknown sender(s) that the user has not yet saved or does not desire to save in a contact list of the mobile terminal. For instance, currently when a user receives a call or message from an unknown sender (e.g., a telemarketer) that the user does not wish to include in a contact list or phonebook of the mobile terminal, the user may save a contact name associated with the unknown sender as “Salesman No. 1” or “Do not Answer” or some other name indicating to the user that the call should not be answered or that the message should not be returned. However, manually adding undesired contact information to the contact list of the mobile terminal is oftentimes undesirable, because it is inefficient, time consuming and burdensome for users to take the time to save the undesired contact information and most users typically want to reserve the contact list for contact information that they really need or desire to be included in the contact list.
As such, it would be beneficial for the mobile terminal to automatically save information in addition to the phone number, email address or username of an unknown caller/sender as well as the date that the call or message was received so that the user of the mobile terminal may utilize the additional information to more readily and easily identify calls and messages received from the same unknown sender(s).
Additionally, it may be beneficial for the mobile terminal to automatically generate contact card information for the unknown senders which may be maintained separate from the mobile terminal's contact list. In this regard, the integrity of the mobile terminal's contact list may be preserved.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide a mechanism in which to automatically generate communication information which may indicate that a call or message received from an unknown sender is unwanted by a user. It also may be desirable to automatically create contact cards associated with information relating to one or more unknown senders and maintain the contact cards in a group separate from a main contact list (e.g., phonebook) of a communication device.